Luca Pozzi, Detectors (2015) exhibition photos

FL Gallery in collaboration with art@CMS presented Luca Pozzi‘s solo exhibition, Detectors which ran October 9 through December 18, 2015, in a former vault for nuclear experimentation, Space 22. The show was the artists’ third in the space that is dedicated to Italian director of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, Fabiola Giannotti. This one in particular focuses on acting as a celebration for a new development in how we read and measure energy particles.

The press release details the events of ’13TV’; a collision energy expressed in tera electron volt (TeV) achieved by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in May this year, which has allowed humans to probe physical matter in scale smaller than ever before. Interestingly, the research and its findings are not able to be applied at the moment, and its potential remains in our imagination. Placing his work in the context of these recent events, Pozzi’s work plays with the suspension of time and our relationship with past, present and future.

The site-specific installation is composed of three giant digital photos on PVC taken from the LHC experiments online archive that cover three walls of the room. On top of these posters are four ‘dodecagonal’ surfaces made of anodized aluminum containing thirty ping-pong balls in magnetic suspension. The anodic oxide finish protects and decorates, and the ping-pong balls are like pictorial devices suspended in space and time. They represent, through the allegory of the ping-pong game, the particle of the beam captured just a moment before a hypothetical collision within an LHC detector. It builds on Pozzi’s ongoing interest in quantum gravity presented in earlier series’ like Supersymmetric Partner (2007 – 2010) and ‘The Big Jump Theory’ (2014), which he elaborated on in an interview with aqnb two years ago.

Interested in a cross-disciplinary approach to making, the artist generates a conversation between contemporary art, science, informatics and technology and pays homage to the laboratory of CERN, which spurred his interest in quantum gravity and beyond since his first visit in 2009.**

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